


Paved with Good Intentions

by EtherDragons



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: A bucket load of OCs, Alternate Universe, Eventual Smut, F/M, Human Mages (Undertale) - Freeform, Human-Monster War (Undertale), Interrogation of POWs, M/M, Minor Character Death, Political Intrigue, Slow burn on the plot but the romance goes like setting fire to dry straw, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2019-10-30 23:51:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17838392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtherDragons/pseuds/EtherDragons
Summary: To magic, intent is everything.It dictates if a monster lives or dies on their own accord, it tells if a human is or isn't able to idolize their own magic to the fullest. The strong-willed amongst both of those can do the unthinkable, if only they truly want to.Seven Mages are poised at the foot of Mount Ebbot to put an end to a dying war.— but one refused.





	1. prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hoping is all we have at this point.

The thundering of hooves on earth heralds their return, cutting through the stagnant, silent night air like a knife. The older man at the head of the three riders heeds his mount with a sharp tug on its reigns, his two retainers doing the same though a few paces behind. He wears his purple cloak around the neck, its hood pulled taut over his balding head, while his companions wear simpler clothes — one carried the mark of her duty in an yellow-speckled scarf draped over her shoulder, and the other wears a deep magenta overshirt, sleeves long and drooping. 

They stop in front of the wide open doors to a barn, built ages before as part of what is now an abandoned farmland, the structure falling apart due to disuse. 

"I see no one," the old man announces to the open mouth of the building.

A male voice responds from within the ruins, its source hidden by the long shadows cast under moonlight. "What do you mean, no one?" 

"I mean what I said, for God's sake. There's no one out here."

"That doesn't make sense," another voice pipes up, a woman this time. Her voice is watery, thin. "They should be here by now."

Two figures emerge from the barn — two women, one with an emerald cloak covering her entire body but her hands, gloved in soft black leather, clasped in front of her stomach, and another dressed in yellow-green robes.

"This doesn't make _sense_ ," the first woman echoes, twisting her hands together. Upon close inspection, she's in fact twisting a thick bronze ring around a finger, the broader part of it bearing a signet obscured in the low light. 

The man in magenta spurs his horse to a gallop, to stand beside the older man. "Maybe we should leave, my liege. Kathryn and I believe this might be a trap."

"Tch, a trap?" responds the male voice, its owner stepping out of the shadow to stand by the emerald-clad woman. He wears a deep navy cloak himself, draped over one shoulder, clasped in place above a plate armor that glows silver in the moonlight. "And who, pray tell, would be daft enough to set a trap like this for us? No council member has been attacked in centuries, I doubt anyone would have half a mind to do so now, of all times."

The rider in magenta sputters, searching for a way to reply, but stops when the older man raises a hand. "Your arrogance will be your downfall yet, my friend," he tells the blue man, grimacing. "I believe we _should_ return."

Both the man in navy and the woman in emerald speak at the same time:

"You must be mad—" 

"We _cannot_ —" 

They share a meaningful look, the sight of it making the older man grimace more.

"You were seated in the same hall as I," the woman steps forwards, reaching with a gloved hand to touch the man's knee. "We no longer have the luxury of sitting in wait."

"And what are we doing now, Sara?" He takes one hand off the reigns, gesturing around the open field where, once, crops were grown, which now stood as little more than dead earth and withering grass. "Tell me how this isn't worse than waiting, and I'll stay. Otherwise —" 

She holds up the hand with the ring, the winged signet carved deep into the metal catching the light and reflecting it with unnatural strength. It's glowing on its own, in truth, aflame with magic. 

"Please, Arthur. A little more is all I ask of you, then we will leave."

"One hour," he relents, telling so to his mounted companions instead of the woman. "If they don't show up by then, I _will_ leave. With or without you."

The navy man and the yellow-green woman return to the shadow of the barn, and Sara smiles up at Arthur. He interrupts her 'thank you' with a wave of his hand, pulling the hood tauter over his face.

"Spare me! To the void with you and Friederich, I cannot believe the two of you convinced me to this."

She smiles. "Wasn't too hard, was it?" 

Arthur sighs heavily. "No. Unfortunately. You've made me soft, you and your bleeding green soul."

"I don't think that was all me,'' Sara pats his knee again, her smile a shade sadder now. "I don't want this war for my child either, friend."

He grunts something unintelligible, pulls at the reigns of his horse to stake away, towards his companions.

"Glenn, to me. Kathryn, I want you to keep your eyes and ears peeled, scout the perimeter around the farm. I'll come for you when we're to leave."

The woman bows her head. "Yes, my liege," she tells him, and spurs her mount away, soon disappearing in the overgrowth.

Arthur sighs again, dismounting. Glenn follows suit, taking the reigns of both their horses, and follows his lord to the shadow of the ruined building.

"If I may speak, my liege?"

"We've been over this a thousand times, Glenn. You don't need my permission to speak your mind."

"My apologies. It's just respectful to ask anyway," Glenn smirks. "Do you think waiting longer is the wisest choice? You must have heard the rumours that this place is —" 

Arthur waves a hand, then uses it to pinch the crooked bridge of his nose. "I am well aware of the rumours, yes."

"So? What do you make of them?" 

They enter the darkness of the ruins, Glenn stopping to tie the horses with the other six, each belonging to one of the high mages inside, and their two retainers. Another three men linger nearby — their symbols of duty a headband striped with green and red, a long coat of shifting navy and cyan scales, and a gauntlet of blue-tinted steel with green filigree. 

Arthur regards each of them with heavy eyes, before he pulls his hood even further over his face, obscuring most of it. 

"I hope they're wrong," he tells Glenn, solemnly. "Hoping is all we have at this point. Our dear Lady Commander won't stay still much longer, I'm afraid."

In a flurry of purple cloth, Arthur turns his back to his retainer, and retreats to the far back — towards a wall that seems to have the wood ripped from the seams, torn down by hand rather than time. Glenn shakes his head to the shadow of his lord and friend, a low laugh stuck in his throat. They all here have children to come home to, and the only hope he has is that they can. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so — I have arguably bad and strictly good news.
> 
> Good news: I have a beta now! Thank you so much [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies) for agreeing to help me with Paved, and with my atrocious grammar.
> 
> Bad news: There won't be updates for a while, not in the strict "new chapters where the plot moves forwards" sense. 
> 
> I'll be rewriting most (if not all) the chapters already published because I feel that my writing is much better in the later chapters, and now that I have a more laid out plan for what I am going to do with the story, I realized the earlier chapters are missing a lot of groundwork, or have things that are either too ambiguous or go directly against with my future plans. 
> 
> Join in the [Discord server](https://discord.gg/s6PHZdr) if you'd like, and check out the [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/alinumo/playlist/4JkgfiC9bgoLlYVdDsgyfv?si=RSnGCZhOQ1a3-fKHvG0uPQ).


	2. dead reckoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> n. To find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.
> 
> — [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fire and smoke and the distant sound of horses.

Lee Jenkins lays on his back, spread out over a thin bedroll that, in this moment, feels better than any proper mattress he's ever laid on in his entire life. His body is still humming with the bone-deep ache of a well spent night, and he stretches slowly, raising both arms straight above his head, fingertips touching the side of the canvas tent, he sighs happily when his joints pop.

Above him, there's only the low ceiling of the tent, the canvas on one side shaking under what must be a particularly strong gust of wind although he'd never know it by how warm it is inside. The air here is heavy, stale, and the heady smell of sex and magic lingers, hanging like a blanket over him and tonight's partner — a sweet water elemental, now curled up by his side, quietly dozing off with her face pressed to the side of his naked chest.

He stretches his legs too, the aching there more pronounced than on his arms. Weariness weights his body down, and ah — what wouldn't he give for the absolute privilege of staying the night here, more so when the monster begins tracing light, watery fingertips across the length of his chest in her sleep.

Alas, it's impossible — Jenkins imagines himself telling an invisible audience, with an overdramatic flip of his long hair and a hand to the forehead, heartbroken —, because if he's not home by dawn his mentor is bound to burst a vein. Chuckling quietly to himself with the mental image he gently pries the elemental's hand away, presses a kiss to her damp palm then another to her temple, and sits up to feel around in the dark for his pants.

He finds them half-stuck between one corner of the tent and a support beam, making a mental note to tell Siobhan later about yet another improbable place his clothes have gotten themselves on (nothing yet seems to be able to surpass the one time he got a single boot flung up and stuck to a leafless tree by the big lake, to much his and that night's partner's bewilderment).

While Jenkins is busy wiggling his legs in their proper holes, the elemental stirs.

"Hmm… It's too early," she hums, propping herself up on an elbow to look at him with those shifting eyes, the water that makes up her entire body moving a tad faster around her face to form a pretty round face, with high cheeks and full lips. He can't _see_ her face, per say, but he's got a pretty good look at it when they met up earlier.

He takes her wandering hand, that had been stretched in search of him, and kisses the palm again. "I know. It breaks my heart to go, but I really have to. Wouldn't be a lot of fun if your superiors were to find you in the morning sleeping with the enemy, would it?"

She fake-grumbles, then chuckles, laying herself down again. "You're not the enemy," then, almost as an afterthought, she adds: "Unless…"

Jenkins tsks, letting go of her hand. "Can't tell you that," he lies, and has enough shame in him to feel bad about it. Better the lie than the truth that he doesn't know anything about it — she wouldn't be the first monster to not believe him on that.

The elemental — Delta, _that's_ her name — makes a noise that could be displeasure, annoyance, or her getting something caught in her throat. He would like to believe it's the latter, however improbable that is — if she _were_ to get something there, it would have happened much earlier in the night.

"Regardless," he exclaims cheerfully, refusing to acknowledge the shift in the mood. "I don't think they would care much to ask me questions first."

Delta snorts, and something rustlers in the dark, she must be pulling the covers over herself.

"Like one of _them_ would be caught dead with a monster," there's an edge of venom to her voice.

"Again, I'd rather not take any chances," Jenkins shifts until he's kneeling, grasping around until he finds her head, brushing some of her cascading hair back to press one last kiss to her mouth. "I like my head right where it is."

The water elemental giggles, and bats at his hand. "I like _mine_ where it is too, so either lay down or leave because I need to wake up at the asscrack of dawn if I want to keep it."

"Oh, but that's a _long_ time from now, sweetheart," his voice drops low by the foot of ear — or at least, of what passes as ear, it looks more like a fin —, and goes back to normal when Delta plants a firm hand on the middle of his face, pushing Jenkins away as he laughs.

He straightens up, as much as possible without hitting his head on the ceiling. "Alright, alright, I got it," he turns, and throws the front flap of the tent up. Moonlight and the flickering red of the camp's torches streak in, and he strains to focus his eyes. "Take care."

From within, Delta yawns. "Always do," and after a heartbeat: "Don't get caught."

Jenkins smiles, sharp and cocky. "Never will," he crawls out of the tent, letting the flap fall into place behind him and remains crouched down.

 _This_ particular branch of his magic is harder to idolise than what he's trained to from childhood, but he has used it so often and for so long at once over these past three years that it only requires Jenkins a little bit more time and focus than his more 'intuitive' fare.

 _Breathe in, breathe out_ , Jenkins thinks to himself, hands loosely joined in the space between his raised knees.

It's by and large more difficult than the quiet suggestion he sent towards Delta earlier, the magic-filled whispers of _tell me what you want_ , _come now_ , and whatnot — although that's made even easier because she had all intention to following through with his requests even _without_ the magic. He almost breaks focus with those thoughts, swallowing what could've been a loud chuckle along with a lungful of air. _Focus_.

Takes another minute until Jenkins manages it — he tugs at his soul, the very source of his magic, unravels it from that one concentrated spot but instead of directing it to a specific person, he allows it to flow outwards, running through his veins and clinging to his hands and half of his arms in a barely visible violet mist, curling up lazily before dissipating in the night air.

Jenkins gets up, then, and begins walking down the rows and rows of tents set up in the southern outpost — this one closest to the looming  shadow of the Fortress, and the smallest of them.

It houses maybe a hundred monsters, most of them healers and some fighters still undergoing training. The other camps have at least double the number, and more experienced people — the biggest one rests closest to the mountain village and the castle, by the foot of Mount Ebott. Jenkins prefers this one over the others, truthfully, as it's less heavily guarded most of the time — thanks to the mages' neutrality in this battle, they don't seem to find the need to have what's essentially training grounds kept like the ones closer to the thick of the skirmishes.

Less guards means less people to influence, too. It's almost child's play to keep the gentle suggestion to look the other way as he walks straight to the wooden gates delimiting the camp's perimeter, and the sole guard — a burly wolf monster, nearly asleep on his post by the way he's leaning with both paws on a thick quarterstaff — doesn't even glance when Jenkins passes by, going then to the edge of the woods separating the southern outpost and the entrance to the Council's Fortress.

Jenkins dissipates his magic with a shake of his broad shoulders as soon as he's out of view and hidden by the lines of trees. A few more paces and he finds his horse right where he left her earlier — the pretty black mare he named Muriel when he first got her whinnies quietly as he approaches, laying a hand on her head. He mounts quickly, the way his legs protest the sudden movement bringing a new wave of dull pleasure, his earlier antics replaying in his mind’s eye. Oh, he _really_ wishes he could stay longer.

 _Soon enough_ , Jenkins tells himself, unfolding the heavy black cloak he'd left stuck to the front of the saddle, and gently spurs his horse towards the beaten path leading further in the woods once it's securely draped over his shoulders, hood pulled low on his forehead to hide his face in shadow. _Soon this war will be over for real, and I'll have all the time I could want to stay with them._

It's maybe fifteen minutes until the wooden area gives out, and the Council's Fortress appears again in his line of sight, and what a beautiful, welcoming sight it is — the keep is more like a castle than Jenkins thinks it has any right being, the tall towers rising from the box-like main building almost white marble under the moonlight, the river that cuts through the training field a stream of starlight behind the heavy iron gates in the front.

Jenkins avoids those, though — he can see four guards on duty, all of them prominently bearing the Commander's scarlet somewhere on their person, streaked with their other colors.

Pulling at the reigns, Jenkins takes the long way around the stone walls, rushing to a gallop in a wide arch along the underbrush so he will, hopefully, blend in with the shadows. He really can't pull off the trick he used on the outpost here, the mage guards are stronger than monsters, and there's too many of them to throw suggestions to at once.

Jenkins approaches a side wall, hidden beneath the northwestern tower's shade, where the stone had been damaged at some point in time and either no one had noticed — there's not much going on this side of the Fortress' grounds, so honestly that's very likely —, or someone had, but hadn't bothered to get it fixed. As it stands, there's an opening on it, with maybe a third of the wall rising up nearly intact, just wide enough for two people to stand on, or for a horse to jump through.

Muriel clears off the raised bit with practiced ease, as their comings and going these past three years have honed her skills as well as Jenkins'.

He then prompts her to go around the tower and back, all the way across the Fortress' length, her hooves quiet in the soft overgrown grass that way. If they'd gone to the front, not only would they absolutely have gotten spotted, but she would make too much noise on the cobblestone paths leading up to the stables — this way is safer, quieter, quicker even.

Soon enough the wooden structure of the smaller stable is close enough that he can safely dismount, and send Muriel on her way. She's never left tied up for exactly this — whether Jenkins skips to the camps outside or not, she'll always be roaming around whenever someone bothers to check.

Xavier believes with a fervor that he's going to get caught sooner or later, but it has been three _years_ already with not a peep from anyone — and he's far too clever for his own good, Jenkins thinks to himself, skipping towards the Fortress' inner walls once more after making sure Muriel was well on her way to the stable.

Another ten minutes later, Jenkins has gone all the way over to the southeastern tower — that one is trickier to go around than the last, housing most of the sleeping quarters in the Fortress. If he's not _very_ careful, there's always guards walking down the corridors, always someone awake this late into the night.

Jenkins eyes his window up at the second floor and readies himself to climb — the walls are made up of large blocks of solid rock, worn by time in such a way there's perfect foot and hand holds almost all the way to the top —, but before he can begin, he's overcome by a sharp pain, irradiating from the center of his chest. It's accompanied by a flare of magic, and only _then_ he realizes the pain is coming from his soul.

He falls to his knees on the ground, clutching at his chest. Violet light bursts between his fingers, the very essence of his being violently protesting whatever is happening, and it _hurts_ so bad that Jenkins panics, a thousand thoughts rushing through his mind as he struggles to understand. It's pain like he's never felt before, like he's going to _die_ on the spot — are there any records of a cardiac arrest of the soul? He can't remember, can barely keep his body working enough to continue _breathing_ properly, air wheezing past his clenched teeth far too loudly.

 _Arthur_ , Jenkins yells at himself in a daze. _I need to find him._ He pushes himself off the ground, his body feeling far too heavy as if gravity had increased tenfold in the time he spent kneeling, and rushes towards the front entrance of the Fortress as fast as his trembling legs would take him, bracing himself on the walls.

Mindless and caring none for his previous preciosism with stealth, he rushes right past several guards on duty, only vaguely aware of the fact he's ducking and dodging them — the ones who don't recognize him and the ones who do alike, uncaring for their orders to halt and questions of why he's out here in the dead of the night —, and soon enough he's full-on running through the familiar corridors leading up the central tower, up winding staircases.

A man in purple-streaked orange shirt tries to stop him, and Jenkins feels like he's watching in third-person perspective as someone else control his body, shoving the man aside directly into a door as he hops up the last flight of stairs two steps at a time, freezing to a stop in front of the doors leading to Arthur's chambers.

He tests the handle — it gives, opening slightly. Not locked. That's a good sign, isn't it? Jenkins slips inside, _hoping_ he'll be met with Arthur questioning why the _fuck_ he's doing up this late, with a scolding to end all the ones he's ever got, _anything_ as long as he can help this pain _stop_ —

— the room is empty.

It's empty and quiet except for a loud noise that pierces through the silence with a vengeance, enough to make Jenkins' head throb in dull pain.

It takes him a minute to realize _he_ is making that noise, screaming incoherently at the empty bed like a dying animal, stumbling forward in the moonlit room to tear the covers out of the bed, vainly hoping Arthur is there, to be met with more _nothing_. His magic flares out again, Jenkins' vision swimming in purple and dripping like fat tears down his face, and he continues to tear the room down, unwilling and unable to accept his mentor isn't here.

Jenkins is not fully cognizant of the amassing of people outside the doors, watching him and talking amongst themselves, until a familiar voice rises above the rest.

"Thank you for fetching me, I shall take it from here," she tells the mages outside, dismissing them. Jenkins turns, clutching at the bedsheets he'd all but ripped out of the bed — there's a big tear down its middle, although he can scarcely see it —, straining to focus his eyes.

The Lady Commander stands in the slowly emptying hallway, burgundy robes encasing her entire body. The hood that usually covers her face in shadow is uncharacteristically pulled down, revealing a square face of pale skin and deep red eyes, long, straight dark brown hair framing it.

She walks toward him deliberately, a pale hand with three gleaming rings comes from under the cloak's cover to reach for Jenkins, though it doesn't go anywhere close to actually touching him.

"Breathe, Lee," Harriet prompts him, face and voice devoid of any emotion. He hadn't noticed he _wasn't_ , so Jenkins takes a shaky gulp of air in.

She seems pleased in a detached way. "Good," her hand returns to its place under the cloak, and she cocks her head to the side, towards the bed. "Sit down, if you'd please. We have to speak."

Jenkins drops the ripped up bedsheet to the floor, and sits down mechanically on the bed. It almost seems like the only things prompting him to move are the Commander's orders, not himself.

Anxiety constricts his throat, but he manages to croak out: "Where's Arthur?"

Harriet tsks, shakes her head. "You know."

Magic floods like blood, Jenkins' entire field of vision covered in a violet filter. He blinks, and more of it streams down his face, his voice coming out in a whimper.

"No."

"Yes," Harriet almost sounds disappointed, maybe annoyed, but it's hard to tell and Jenkins is in no position to tell for sure. "You know better than to try and fool yourself, Lee. He's—"

" _No!_ " Jenkins shouts, squeezing his eyes closed and both hands into fists. His chest still hurts, though the pain is now a dull ache spreading through his entire body, pointedly like something had been ripped away and all that's left is the phantom of hurt.

The Commander sighs, and a rustle of fabric makes Jenkins open his eyes again, and she has her right hand out, palm down. He blinks a couple times before he understands what she's showing him — three rings on that hand too, one on each finger, except the last and the thumb. Thick gold band, identical to the gold on the brooch fastening her cloak together, each with a large, round crystal mounted atop: one purple, one navy, one cyan.

Only the cyan gem is alight with magic, pulsing softly. The other two are dull, not even reflecting the moonlight from the window.

Jenkins' entire body shudders, revulsed by the sight, by what it means.

"Three Head Mage's souls were snuffed out tonight," Harriet declares, turning her hand up and flexing her fingers slowly, as if she were trying to hold something from thin air. "It pleases me no more than it does you to know this, believe me, but we cannot avoid the unavoidable."

He wraps both arms around himself, feeling very vulnerable and naked, in a way that has nothing to do with the fact he's still shirtless but for the black robes draped over his shoulders, and sobs quietly. There's no chance in hell he will be able to stop crying, but it doesn't mean he doesn't feel ashamed for it.

The Lady Commander hums, and there's more sounds of rustling fabric — if she had just put her hand under the cloak again, or if she left, Jenkins can't tell. He's crying uncontrollably, each sob ripped out of his throat shaking his entire body.

Suddenly, Jenkins feels hands grasping at his arms, making him get up from the bed. He looks around, through the violet haze, and sees the two mages are familiar ones — they both wear purple with their other colors, their faces are ones he spent most of his life seeing. His body is boneless in their hold, and he's fairly sure one of them must be using gravity magic but he doesn't have it in him to fight it.

Harriet has her hood pulled up now, and she gestures toward the doors. "They'll see that you go back to your bed chambers, Lee. Tomorrow morning we shall speak."

He's dragged out of Arthur's room, barely awake. The bursts of magic left him exhausted, and soon Jenkins succumbs to the feeling. His dreams are filled with fire and smoke, and the distant sound of horses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit date: June 17th, 2019
> 
> Thank you so much [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies) for beta-ing ❤!


	3. kuebiko

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> n. A state of exhaustion inspired by an act of senseless violence, which forces you to revise your image of what can happen in this world — mending the fences of your expectations, weeding out invasive truths, cultivating the perennial good that’s buried under the surface — before propping yourself up in the middle of it like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams but powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.
> 
> — [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would have gladly given my life for his.

Morning comes with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sunlight shines through an open window directly into Jenkins' face, making his headache return with a vengeance. He wakes up groggy and disoriented, struggling to remember how he got to his room when he has no memory of the climb up.

When he does remember, through the pain and the purple haze, he truly wishes he hadn't. His soul still hurts, a sore spot where something that used to be had ceased to, throbbing with the memory of a harsher ache. Jenkins rubs his chest, and flips over to his stomach on the bed with his eyes still closed, tries to find solace in unconsciousness. If anything, in his sleep he can pretend for a little longer that yesterday hadn't happened, that nothing was off.

It doesn't seem like that relief will be given to him — as soon as he started to drift off, someone knocked on the door. Once, twice, thrice, each time louder than the last. There's a voice, too, but it's unsurprisingly hard to hear it through the solid wood door and his pillow.

Whoever is out there keeps on knocking despite Jenkins pointedly ignoring it like a petulant child, so he has to drag himself out of bed, least they decide to barge in like it would be expected when dealing with a petulant child.

Behind the door stands a ragged woman, with a purple scarf with small yellow dots speckled over the fabric wrapped around her neck. She has such a stern expression on her face it takes Jenkins a moment to connect the sight with the cheerful retainer who taught him how to ride, and gifted him Muriel ten-odd years ago, the one who called him 'young master' almost as a joke. Kathryn folds her hands low in front of her, and bows her head low.

"Apologies for disturbing you, my liege," the words aren't necessarily foreign to her voice, though directed at _him_ they were. "Your presence is required at the Hall of the Ancients."

Jenkins stares blankly at her, his mind simply refusing to understand the meaning of her words all while it tries to wrestle some sense out of the strangeness that is _seeing_ her — a Head Mage's retainers are their closest allies, strong and resourceful mages chosen specifically from the Fortress' ranks to defend and protect them with their lives if needed. A formality in times of peace, in those past centuries where the mages hadn't been threatened once.

A dam inside Jenkins breaks watching Kathryn pay respects to him as she did Arthur, and he steps forward without thinking, getting right on her face.

"Why are you here?" He spits out, hands clenched into fists.

Kathryn's eyes go wide, and she steps back. "I— I was sent to escort you to the Hall."

"No," Jenkins' voice breaks a little, almost wholly undermining his anger. "Why are you _here_ , why —," he chokes on his own venom, before he can drive the sword he really wants to brandish, both at her breast and his own — _why are you here when Arthur isn't?_ He screams inside his own head, unable to vocalize it.

His eyes sting, his head hurts and his throat burns with the need to scream himself raw, while Kathryn looks at him with deep sorrow in her warm brown eyes. Looks almost like pity, and the thought of being _pitied_ spurs Jenkins on even further.

"Where were you yesterday?"

"With them," her voice is unnaturally stiff, as if she were struggling to keep it so.

Jenkins grinds his teeth together. "What happened, then?"

Kathryn hesitates, likely for her own sake, shakes her head slowly. "I do not know. Ser Kingston had me scouting around the perimeter of the farmland we were in, and suddenly the whole place was aflame. I had to make a choice, to go or to leave, and I am sure he would have wanted me to —"

" _Don't,_ " he barks out, jaw locked so tight his teeth might be cracking under the pressure. "How can you fucking pretend to know what he would have wanted? You could have _helped_! Isn't that your goddamn—"

Deep in his tirade, Jenkins misses the way her eyes harden in anger, as well as her arm moving hard and quick, a crack of a whip and her hand descends heavy on the side of his face. He goes reeling to the side with a choked yelp, his entire cheek burning in pain.

"And what do _you_ know of his wants, boy?" Kathryn sneers at him, her hand still held up high as if she wanted to strike him again. "I — I stood by his side for longer than you have been _alive_. I would have gladly given my life for his, do you truly think otherwise?!

"You weren't there. You didn't _see_ it. He would have wanted me, or Glenn if he was in my place, to return for your _ungrateful_ hide as soon as it was clear _he_ might not," she spits the word in his face, lowers her hand. "He would have wanted nothing more than for us to look out for you, his stupid boy. Lord knows you need it."

Jenkins remains hunched by the doorframe, hot tears streaming down his face — angry, frustrated, sad tears. He tries to speak, but all that leaves his mouth is a pitiful whimper. Kathryn breathes deeply, and recomposes herself.

"Get yourself together," her voice is completely level again, but her eyes still burn. "You have duties to attend to, and by the void I'll take you there willingly or not."

* * *

Having shed the black cloak before leaving, Jenkins walks behind the armor-clad retainer naked from the waist up and barefoot. He felt no need to dress nicer — tradition says a mage should be as they're most comfortable in important moments, and he enjoys both the feeling of the rough stone floors under his feet and the cool morning breeze whizzing from the open windows, as he does the small flame of defiance he holds on to with all he still has in him. The void can take whoever looks at him twice for his choices, he would have gone fully naked if he didn't have a shred of decency still.

Kathryn hadn't spoken or looked at him since they left his bedchambers, and for that he's both grateful and a bit ashamed.

The walk is long — his room is in the southeastern tower, and the Hall of Ancients lies deep in the heart of the Fortress, at the highest floor in the central tower. It is the only place in the whole place he'd never been to, except other people's rooms, and he's caught by surprise by the sheer amount of stairs they have to ascend. Above the floors where the Head Mages' and the Commander's bedchamber lie, there's an infinite coiling staircase. The wind that comes from the small windows here is less of a breeze and more of a howling storm, and Jenkins is suddenly very regretful of not wearing a shirt.

They keep going for forever, it seems, until they arrive at the top of the stairs. Here, it opens to a round room, the floors made of white marble, and colorful tapestries hung on the walls. Six people are here, standing in a half circle — six more retainers, Jenkins realizes. There's Mirrek, with his red and gold plate armor; Zhao, with his orange-tinted gauntlet set with red crystals on each knuckle; Natalya, with a cyan cloth tied around her head, striped with green; Greta, in a yellow dress with a heavy purple and navy belt; and two more Jenkins doesn't recognize: a young woman in a green, cyan and orange loose shirt, and an androgynous person with a navy half cloak streaked with purple covering one shoulder. They all bow when he enters the room, and it makes him feel all the more upset.

"This where I will leave you, my liege," Kathryn addresses Jenkins suddenly, though she doesn't look at him still. She moves to stand between Mirrek and the person in the half cloak, eyes downcast.

To their left, opposite to the stairs Jenkins and Kathryn had come up, there's a bare stone archway, and beyond it another flight of stairs. He bows his head curtly to the retainers, and proceeds to go further up. Not so long after, he's led directly to the back of the Hall of Ancients, and for a moment after he pops his head above the floor, Jenkins is in awe of what he sees.

The Hall is a large circular room, with similar floors to the last one and a high dome ceiling, but the walls are made entirely of glass. Dozens of stained glass murals shine with sunlight, depicting the history of the Council — from the War of Divide and its foundation as a beacon of peace and unity between mages, to Lord Commander Pietr's death, Astrid's marriage to the late King Gormock, and Harriet's ascent to her current seat. _It looks like solid stone from outside_ , he marvels, mind rushing through what kind of magic is doing so, but he soon puts it all aside.

Arranged in a semicircle in the middle of the room, there's seven seats, and an iron brazier in the center. All the chairs are made of solid wood, engraved with swirls and depictions of souls, and cushions of a single color, one of each. The one emblazoned in red stands in the middle, and higher than the others, up a small stone platform.

Jenkins is startled to awareness by an annoyed voice shouting, "Are you done?"

He looks for the source, locking eyes with Yekaterina, seated directly to the right of the Commander's chair. She looks at him with narrowed, shimmering orange eyes, tapping her fingers on the arm of her seat. The Head Mage of Bravery is a fearsome sight — scarred and hardy, with a permanent scowl etched on her face, decked in a light leather armor that holds her pure orange cloak back, although it's still fastened at the shoulder by her brooch, soul-shaped gemstone drinking in the sunlight —, and Jenkins had always hated being pinned down by her stare.

"Please, Katyusha," a man chuckles, his voice a lazy drawl. "Don't act like _you_ were any less enraptured the first time you came here."

Jenkins then snaps out of it fully, and focuses his eyes on the people in the room. The man that just spoke is the Head Mage of Patience, Mikhail. He's seated by the Commander's left, at the closest chair to the entrance — a waifish, very pale man with a thick, short white beard, a sharp widows peak, and his cyan cloak tied at the throat by his brooch, simple neutral clothes underneath. Between him and the Commander, lays two empty chairs, the navy and the purple ones.

"Don't fucking call me that, _Misha_ ," Yekaterina spits at him, crossing her arms over her chest and sneering.

By her right, sits the very bemused Head Mage of Justice, Elena. She's a small, black woman with a thick crown of short dark hair framing her round face, contrasting heavily with the bright yellow cloak covering her body. Further still, another empty chair — green, this time.

"Stop this quarreling," Harriet commands, from her higher seat, sharply gesturing towards Mikhail who'd been ready to shoot a retort. He closes his mouth, and sits back on the chair with a lopsided smile. "We have a most important business to conduct. Lee, please," she gestures for him to approach.

He does as bid, clearing off the stairs and feeling the warm marble under his feet, eyes falling on the last two people in the room.

Siobhan, tall and all lean muscle, stands by the left of the brazier. She has her short jet-black hair brushed back, and a fine shirt with a grey wool vest, and grey slacks, and she stands perfectly still — a startling contrast to Xavier, by her side. He's a plump guy, built like a barrel, a mop of brown-red curls atop his head, and thick round glasses. He's also far more finely dressed than Jenkins, with his dark green sweater and jeans, though he's bounding with nervous energy, shifting from one foot to the other as he looks back to Jenkins. His eyes are red and puffy, he had clearly been crying.

Jenkins steps towards the brazier, coming to a stop between Siobhan and Xavier. He's itching to reach for either, or both, of them — they're his best friends in this place, all three coming to the Fortress young, and being raised together —, but he knows he can't.

"We shall begin at once", the Commander hums, and energy gathers around her. Like electricity, it crackles throughout the room with terrifying power, gathering in her outstretched palms. Brighter than the soft morning sunlight, it licks at her fingers in sharp streaks, runs down her arms to disappear underneath her cloak.

Jenkins feels every inch of his skin rise in goosebumps with the display of raw power. Pure Determination is a rare sight, much more so than any other kind — in fact, it's only ever been displayed by the descendants of the First Commander, whereas the other Head Mages come from all sorts of places. It raises in him a sort of primal fear, but he cannot do anything but stand and watch as she rises from her seat and walks to the brazier. It bursts to life as Harriet comes to a stop in front of the trio, an explosion of pure red flame.

"You stand in the ancient home of our kind, built from the ashes of a battle that almost brought us to extinction," Harriet chants, the lower portion of her face illuminated in blood light. "From the ashes of your predecessors, you rise. Their soul and their power live on in you, and may the memory of them guide you. Speak their names."

Siobhan speaks first, her voice steely. "Friederich Ebner."

Jenkins swallows hard, trying to not let his voice waver. "Arthur Kingston."

Xavier hesitates, and when he speaks, it's in a whisper. "Sara Lécuyer."

Harriet rips the dead crystals from her rings, throws them one by one in the brazier. "Feed the flame with your own, and hold the ashes of that which came before."

Again, Siobhan is the first to heed. Blue light engulfs her arms up to the elbows, and as soon as she reaches into the flames they burst in navy as well, twisting around the scarlet. Xavier goes right after, peals of green liquid light clinging to his hands, and the tri-colored flames burn even brighter than before.

Jenkins summons the image of Arthur in his head — the old, balding man, with his nearly cropped salt-and-pepper beard and cold, hard blue eyes he was the day before he… and the slightly younger man that took him in, the kind but harsh professor, the man who taught him he had worth where no one had done so before —, and his magic flows easy from his soul, thicker than air but lighter than liquid, the violet mist flows from his bare chest and swirls down his arms, mix with the others in a plume of purple fire when he takes the ashes in his hand.

Only then does Harriet speak again. "This is a lifelong duty, that you were bound to in the second your essential being was forged from the primordial magic of the void. You will only be free from it when your soul returns to where it came from.

"Today your duty begins. You are the sword and the shield, ruler and servant to our kind. By the souls of those who made these seats theirs, from the First Council to the ones whose names you've spoken, you shall pledge your life in defense of this ancient halls, our last stronghold against all that might threaten our kind, until your soul no longer pulses, and your magic vanishes."

Jenkins feels his magic thrumming, flowing more and more to his closed fist, reacting to the oath, even as it's not required for him to do so — it's not like he could refuse it, even if he wanted to. Besides him, Xavier gasps. Magic consolidates in a single point, and the ashes in his hand shift alongside it, until something round and smooth lays in their place.

"Open your hands."

He does so, turning his hand palm up above the flames. Sitting on top, there's a crystal, identical to the ones Harriet threw in the brazier, bright purple and pulsing with its own light to the beat of Jenkins' soul. He doesn't need to look to his sides to know his friends hold the same thing.

Harriet then reaches into the flames again, holding up three golden brooches. The soul-shaped gems set on them glow, for a moment, and stop.

"Head Mage of Integrity," the Commander calls, plucking the crystal from Siobhan's hand and laying the navy brooch on its place. "Head Mage of Perseverance," she does the same with Jenkins, then Xavier. "Head Mage of Kindness. You shall now sit in council with us. May your rule be long, and may you never stray from your duty."

The three other Head Mages, from their seats, echo her last words. They boom through the circular room, seemingly rising in volume each time, to the point it feels like the stained glass visage of their predecessors are speaking as well.

Jenkins clutches the brooch on his fingers until he feels the edge of the soul-shaped gemstone cut into his fingers. He searches in the light of the windows for the purples, a hundred of them looking over, looking _at_ him, and he wonders how long it will be until they put Arthur among them. He misses entirely the Lady Commander retreating from the still burning flames back to her seat at the head of the council, though he doesn't miss the command:

"Now, take your seats," she breathes heavily then, and when he looks, she has one elbow propped on the arm of her chair, head on a delicate hand shining orange, yellow and green. "We have much to discuss, I'm afraid. I shall try to make it brief — there's still a burial to be held tonight."

Council members are anointed at sunrise, Arthur had told him, and council members are buried in moonlight. To close their cycle. The thought of it follows Jenkins on his way to the purple seat, weighing down every step he took.

Siobhan reached hers first, unfolding the length of heavy navy fabric with a flourish to lay upon her shoulders — his soul thrums weakly in admiration of her, regal and composed, green-grey eyes fixed on the flames so intently he's in wonder of how she fixed the medallion so neatly under her throat. She, out of the three of them, had always been the one he thought would make the best Head Mage.

Though he always thought, like all of them, she would do so much later in the future. 

Jenkins hesitates in front of his seat, now, looking down at his cloak. It's clearly newly made, unmarred by time and wear. He remembers the edges of Arthur's had been a bit frayed, much to his dismay, and had a fist-sized hole in the middle from an incident where, when they were younger, Glenn had flickered a cigarette cherry on it by accident, and they'd only realized when Kathryn shouted the cloak was on fire. That was when Arthur began wearing it like a scarf, Glenn had told him while chortling one time. 

Jenkins swallows the memory along with the thought that Glenn was _also_ dead now, unfolds the new cloak and drapes it over one shoulder, affixing the brooch over his collarbone on the other side. The coolness of the metal bites his skin, and the weight of it feels wrong, somehow. Like he weren't supposed to wear it. _I'm not,_ he tells himself, watching with detached fascination as the Lady Commander extinguishes the brazier's flames with a flick of her wrist. _I was supposed to have ten or so more years of being an apprentice, if I was lucky. I'm not, apparently._

His, honestly self-deprecating and a bit dramatic, inner dialogue is interrupted briskly by Harriet's voice. "On the matter of our former colleagues' deaths," she declares with no other indication that she'd begun the meeting. "Elena, your findings?"

The Head Mage of Justice rises from her seat, drawing a notepad from within her cloak. "My Lady Commander, I have sent ten of my best men and women to investigate the place appointed by ser Kathryn, and to retrieve the bodies. They have confirmed her suspicion," Elena pauses, flips through her notes. "May I approach?"

"You may."

"Thank you. By their reports —" She's showing Harriet something on the paper, though Jenkins can't see a reaction to whatever it is. "— the dying flames were sheer white. They exuded magic, and even though by that point my people could not pinpoint the source, it's no mystery that no mage alive could produce such colors."

Harriet hums, and both the sound and the words feel to Jenkins like a cold fist was grabbing at his throat, squeezing the air out of him. Elena isn't quite through yet.

"Furthermore, ser Kathryn has willingly parted with the knowledge of what they had hoped to accomplish yesterday at that abandoned plot of land, and we found this as proof," she picks something from her cloak again, small and silver, and puts it in Harriet's hand. She turns it around in those long fingers of hers, and dismisses Elena without a word.

Silence lingers while the Head Mage returns to her seat, and the Lady Commander examines the link of silver that Jenkins cannot identify as much more than apparently a ring from where he's seated. Her hand withdraws with it back into her own cloak, and he can hear the faint sound of her hands clapping together.

"As I feared," she sighs, and there's legitimate pain in her otherwise blank voice. "It seems my nephew has grown tired of our neutrality, or perhaps he still blames us for his father's death."

Yekaterina makes a noise, a disgusted sneer, and Jenkins swears he can hear the sound of wood crackling under her hands. Anticipation coils in his gut like a snake, cold sweat breaks on his forehead because he _knows_ in his gut what's going to happen, but his mind cannot fully grasp it yet.

Harriet taps her long fingers on the arm of her chair, the sound of nails ticking like a clock. No one speaks, waiting — Jenkins looks across the room to meet Xavier's eyes, wide and wet, and he's clutching his robes like a child with a blanket.

"This slight cannot go unpunished," the Lady Commander says at last, all previous trace of emotion gone from her voice. "Petrykha, Fyodorov," the orange and cyan Head Mages rise from their seats, Yekaterina followed by a crackle of orange energy stemming from her eyes. "I need both of you to prepare our offense. Take Velazco with you, he needs to learn his place among our healers."

Yekaterina stalks out of the Hall with a curt nod of her head, in a flurry of orange. Mikhail heaves a sigh, walks over to Xavier, and offers him a hand. Xavier takes it, looking frantically to Jenkins and then to Siobhan, before Mikhail tugs him away.

"Hayward," Harriet calls once they're gone, turning her shadowed face to Siobhan. "You stay with me. I need you to go over your duties as well, though I trust you know what they are already," there's almost the edge of a smile on her voice then, and Siobhan replies with a sharp nod of her own, standing up to put herself up in the dais, next to Harriet's seat.

"Jenkins," he nearly jumps at the call, and then _actually_ jumps to his feet, quickly fixing the cloak over his shoulder. "I want you to go with Cordeiro. She shall go over what's expected of you during the battle."

"Ba-battle, my Lady?" Jenkins stammers dumbly, his heart racing to his throat. That can't be it. This can't be the tipping point, _can't_. Elena has walked up to his side of the room, one hand falling upon his covered shoulder.

"Yes. Battle," Harriet talks to him as if he were a particularly dim-witted child, and by her side Siobhan stiffens. "If the King of Monsters grows tired of our neutrality to come to this, we shall be neutral no longer. Now go," she waves a hand on their direction, turning her head towards Siobhan. "We all have things to attend to."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit date: July 3rd, 2019
> 
> Me: Oh I might have written too many OCs to follow  
> Also me: What if I introduce another 28 OCs???
> 
> Shout out to [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies), the most excited beta ever.


	4. kudoclasm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> n. When lifelong dreams are brought down to earth.
> 
> You don't have the luxury of floating through life, because you may not have the time. The future is already rushing towards you, and it's not as far away as you think.
> 
> — [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was praying you'd be smart.

The thing Jenkins had to attend to is, apparently, the dungeons underneath the Fortress. He and Elena descend the steps to the waiting room below the Hall of Ancients in silence, then all the way down the endless staircases to the main room where Elena sends Greta off to fetch Cynthia — her second retainer —, along with a number of people, of which Jenkins recognizes half the names. Kathryn must have as well, because as soon as Elena is done reciting all of them she asks for leave to find them, so they must be Arthur's — _his_ , now — mages.

They stand alone in the room, an unremarkable place by all means compared to the Hall or the room below, all stone and small windows to the inner courtyard. Elena watches the retainers go off, while Jenkins watches his own feet. As soon as their steps are no longer echoing off the corridors, Elena turns to him.

"You really ought to choose another one."

Jenkins raises his eyes to meet hers, finding himself looking down into dull yellow-brown eyes and a secretive smile. She catches his confusion, and just continues on. 

"I know, I know," Elena waves a hand, closing one eye. "You feel like you're not yet filling his shoes. I've been there, believe me, but it hardly matters now. You're particularly lucky for having Kathryn still, though you still need two retainers," she continues to look him in the eye with that charged stare, hums softly. "Oh, yes. I'm sure Alec would do a good job, if you were to ask him."

Jenkins grunts, shuffles in place. Alec's face flashed through his mind for a whole second, mostly because the young mage had been part of his own personal guard for a couple years — and they may or may not have flirted for some time, until Jenkins realized it could never be for much more than his status as a future Head Mage. Elena makes a surprised face he's absolutely sure is fake, and laughs. 

"I'd appreciate it a _lot_ if you got out of my head, Elena," he mumbles to the Head Mage, crossing his arms.

She's still half laughing. "Apologies, Lee," Elena blinks, and the yellow of her eyes disappears, leaving them dark brown. "Force of habit."

Jenkins grumbles noncommittally, returns to staring down at his bare feet. If he's being terribly rude, Elena doesn't say anything about it. She rocks on the balls of her sandalled feet, hums to herself. 

Soon enough, Kathryn and Greta are back — followed by Cynthia, in yellow, orange and red, and three dozen mages following close, half of them prominently in purple, the other half in yellow. Jenkins and Elena both seem to notice young Alec near the end of the host, and she snickers quietly before stepping forward.

"Good morning," she calls to them, both hands folded behind her back, over the cloak. "We will be descending to the dungeons today, to see their state and if they need repairs. Lord knows we haven't put them to use in a long time," Elena shakes her head, the crown of tight dark curls barely moving with the motion. 

There's a murmur of 'yes's in reply, and the host parts when she makes to move towards the door, her retainers moving to walk behind her. Elena looks over her shoulder to Jenkins, beckoning him to follow, and he hurries to, though he feels in no particular hurry to go to the dungeons.

He's well aware of where they are — Arthur had told him, over and over, that the Head Mage of Perseverance should know the Fortress like the back of their hand, for their lot was holding information, so they'd been down there once or twice over the years — as well as their _state_. 

Elena, him, and their entourage turn a sharp corner, then it's down a shaft where they must descend single-file, and they're underneath the Fortress. Those are not, in fact, the dungeons yet. This place is a winding maze of corridors, dead ends and secret passages to the other six towers, and to some places outside the outer walls, wide enough for six people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder. 

He lets Elena go first, though he has to point out every so often when she's about to make a wrong turn, and it's not long until they've navigated to the entrance — yet another trapdoor on the ground, this time leading to a set of wooden stairs that have seen better days. Jenkins goes first then, telling her that _he's_ not liable to break a leg if the thing decides to snap, to which Elena chuckles and tells him they ought to get some stoneshaper guys over soon, and down he goes.

Jenkins walks down the damp, pitch black hallway just far enough to give people some room to come down too, and begins rubbing his hands together. A spark of magic runs from his soul down his arms, gathering in a slightly liquid-y looking flame in his hands, and when he opens them, the flame splits in four, floating to the nearest empty sconces on the walls. Producing fire like this amounts to a party trick between mages — some people even use it to light smokes, or to read when they don't want the lights on —, but even that little makes him feel bone-tired. He's probably not over yesterday's bursts just yet.

Elena has come down by now, and lit up another dozen sconces with yellow fire. Jenkins walks forward to light another couple up, stopping when the effort makes him start to sweat, despite the fact it's cold as hell in here. 

The dungeons weren't designed with comfort in mind, and that's plain to see. A central corridor runs into darkness beyond, no end in sight, wide enough for ten people or more to pass through without squeezing. Evenly spaced throughout both sides of the corridor, the cells are like open mouths full of rusted over, old metal teeth. Each cell could hold comfortably about twenty people, but again, nothing of this was built with _comfort_ in mind, and he estimated double that could be crammed in each of them. 

He continues down the corridor, a flame lit up on his palm to guide his way. Elena's voice gets lost behind him as Jenkins turns a corner when the hallway splits, into a big round room. It's white marble from floor to ceiling, his purple fire bounces off the walls with a gloomy light. An old, rotten wooden chair sits in the middle, the chains that once probably glowed with cyan magic now piles of rusted metal. Water drips lazily down from a small hole in the ceiling. 

 _Information_ , he shudders at the thought, more violently than he had at the cold. _That's the kind of information I'm going to be gathering now._

The corridors are full of voices now. Mages reporting to each other about broken cell doors, rats, mold. There has been a cave in further down the dungeons, he hears the shout. Jenkins can't move from the interrogation room, however, merely standing guard to a ruined chair, and feeling more and more like a shell of himself. 

A minute could have passed, or several hours, when Elena pokes her head in, calling him. Her eyes are glowing with magic. Jenkins grinds his teeth at the sight, and she frowns. 

"Get out of my head," he grunts. She opens her mouth to say something, probably in response to whatever she heard from his rushing mind, and he snaps. " _Get_ _out_ , Elena," Jenkins' voice drops an octave, echoing from the empty walls. The yellow in her eyes immediately dissipate, and he feels an empty pain blossoming from his soul. 

Elena steps in the room, movements stilted like she's being physically restrained, but not well enough to fully stop her, and offers Jenkins a hand. He doesn't take it, so she drops it, sighs. 

"This is no easier for me than it is for you," Elena tells him. He wouldn't take her for a liar but, honestly, he's beginning to tire from hearing this.

Jenkins absently rubs three fingers over his breastbone, above the point where his soul rests. It hurts, and now that Elena has entered the room with her own flames, he can extinguish his. 

"We need to replace this chair," is all he says in response, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. 

Elena frowns a little, but doesn't say anything. She nods curtly, and walks out with him following close behind. The rest of the dungeons lie in exactly the same state of disarray they did the first time Jenkins descended here, maybe four years prior. 

The walls shine with a hundred lights, most of them mixture of colors, not as bright as the pure yellow and purple flames, though no less beautiful. Where the mages on their host would wear their soul colors clearly displayed against each other, their actual magic more often than not didn't display itself as such — a mage draped in purple and navy and red would have a deep plum colored flame to match, while one who wore yellow and cyan would have both colors as shown on their clothes. He remembers the walls lit with only purple, twin shades of it, and his chest flares in pain again. 

Jenkins walks up and down the pathways with Elena, stopping every so often so she can talk to some mage or another, hushed reports of damage that she keeps track of on her notepad of yellow pages. He doesn't speak anymore, to anyone — she doesn't ask him to. 

The rest of the day rushes past him the way time only does in dark little places like this. Soon, too soon, a man dressed in Harriet's red approaches, the thin scarf tied around his neck streaked with green. He taps Elena's shoulder. 

Elena looks at him, blinks, and her brown eyes flash yellow for a second. "Thank you, Rashid," she tells him softly, and the mage nods, turns around and stalks off to the end of the hallway. "Go find Kathryn, Lee. The funeral is starting soon," and she, too, leaves. To find her retainers, most likely. 

Numbly, Jenkins walks out to one end of the main pathway, dodging the puttering mages still hard at work — he spots three, all with dark blue on their personal sigils, moving great weights of fallen rocks engulfed in colorful light out of a cell, into a pile near the cave-in ahead, another two ripping rusted over metal bars from the ground to join another pile of similar broken things  —, then down the other way when he doesn't see Kathryn there.

He finds her the other way around, standing sourly by the wooden steps up. She doesn't quite look at Jenkins, and he doesn't say anything when she turns around and begins ascending, mouth full of the taste-memory of blood. The murmur of talking echoes from the dungeons below to the cavernous maze, but as Head Mage and retainer walk, they leave those behind, until all that's left is the sound of her heavy leather boots on the ground. His bare feet make no noise, and Jenkins finds that despite the bone-deep ache that comes with the cold, he quite likes being silent. He imagines sneaking past all Kathryn and all the guards, off into the night, unnoticed one last time, with those feather-light feet. 

 _Not now_ , Jenkins tells himself, shaking his head.

* * *

The inner courtyard is crowded, once they get there. The entire population of the Fortress — mage and the few non-mage alike — has come out to pay respects to the lost. Jenkins is only halfway aware of the path Kathryn opens through the mass of people to the center of the yard, where a circle of white stones marks the ceremony spot.

There will be no pyre tonight — there wasn't enough of the bodies left for that, Jenkins reasoned with an odd sort of detachment —, instead someone set up a stone dais across the middle of the stone circle, eight urns resting atop. They are made of copper, polished to reflect the full moon like rounded mirrors, three of them emblazoned with the colors of their 'occupants', the remaining showing the Council's sigil — a white heptagon with one of the seven colors on each point. 

Jenkins sees himself reflected upon the urns, sees the tremble on Kathryn's mouth when she's standing behind him, and little else around him. He is, of course, conscious of the other Head Mages, and their pair of retainers standing guard behind them — Xavier and Siobhan had chosen already, mages he would have thought he should know if he could stop and think at all —, and also of the unfamiliar words of mourning Harriet says in a strangely charged, booming voice as he falls in line with the rest, those that sound oddly similar to the oath she had them swear earlier but there's always the possibility he wasn't hearing her at all, only remembering.

Jenkins is, however, acutely aware of Xavier off to his left — not quite _of_ him, rather of the despair and bone-deep sadness rolling off him like waves, filling the stale night air with a crackle of uncontrolled magic, as if he didn't have the willpower to stop from broadcasting his grief. He sobs, loud enough to startle Jenkins, when Harriet moves to say her words over the green-emblazoned urn. He is also mindful of the low pull of his and Siobhan’s connection, the gentle tide that almost makes him want to reach for her hand, for some comfort from his remaining soulmate, but when he glances off to catch her face on the periphery of his vision, all he sees is a hard mask of polished stone, her eyes hard and her already thin lips pressed together in a line as sharp as a knife's blade, and he doesn't. 

The rest of the ceremony passes in a blur, and soon there's three servants, non-mage workers in their dull grey clothes, coming forward to take the fallen Head Mages off of the dais, get them to the crypts to rest amongst those who came before. Jenkins watches, feeling increasingly detached from his own consciousness, and offhandedly wonders if Arthur would now meet _his_ mentor, Iona, in the void beyond. The thought both pains and comforts him in equal measures, though the feeling is dull, lukewarm. 

Harriet _tells_ them, there, what happened. What will happen. The tension throughout the crowd is palpable, and tastes like ash in Jenkins' mouth. 

Five more servants come forward to take the other urns, and Jenkins hears the sharp intake of breath from behind him, the marble statue in Kathryn's shape stirring, then it's over. Jenkins leaves without saying anything, his cloak swirling around him when he turns. His retainer follows close behind his heels, silent as well for the entire way except to briefly remind him, once they reach the entrance of the Fortress, that his bedchambers are on the central tower, now. 

The room has clearly been cleaned out, Jenkins realizes when he enters. Anything he's ruined yesterday replaced by his old things, from the bedspread to the emptiness of the desk by the window — Arthur always had papers, stacks and stacks of them, notes and prints, reports and memos —, to the clothes in the wardrobe. He wonders what has been done with Arthur's things, and then decides he doesn't want to know.

Kathryn doesn't follow him in, doesn't even step through the door. A blessing, really, because it gives him more than enough time in the dark to plan. 

The central tower's base lies inside the Fortress, he can see the stone ceilings when he looks down out of the window. It's not as exposed to nature as the outer towers, so the walls seem smoother, newer. Unclimbable. It's also farther away from the stables as he would have liked, so going down from here won't do.

Jenkins takes off the purple cloak and the brooch, throws both uncaringly on the bed, and goes rummaging through his clothes for his quarry — the worn black leather boots, and his dark hooded cloak —, throws both on with a mindless kind of focus. Dread fills his mouth like bile, deep dark feelings that he doesn't want to feel, and the only thing he can think of to give him respite from them is the same one thing he always finds himself running to — away. For a night, for a couple hours, before the camps outside are reduced to ash, before they know who he is now.

He stops, for a second, and decides his black cloak is too conspicuous. Turns around to grab instead some woolen grey pants, and a soft grey shirt, and wraps the length of the hooded robes around his neck and shoulders like a scarf, his hair tucked tightly out of the way. Dressed like one of the non-magical workers, he can feasibly go anywhere without being questioned, which is exactly what he wants. 

* * *

 It's too easy.

No one bothers watching too closely the unmagical here — they come and go everywhere, nearly all the time, cooks and cleaners and stableboys. Dressed like this he's all but invisible. It's just a matter of keeping his head low and shoulders hunched, walk fast but not _too_ fast. The willing tunnel vision only really reserved for servants is heightened by the lingering feelings from the funeral. 

The Fortress is in mourning, and it's also getting ready. 

Three people in grey rush past him dragging carts of clinging metal covered by orange tarps, just as there's a small group of people with different combinations of purple and green and every other color in their sigils hunched together in a corner, speaking in hushed, sad voices. Even outside the masses linger, some basking in the glorious moonlight of the last day of peace, some paying respects to the first to fall, some off to every which corner of the courtyard, likely training, praying or crying. Jenkins ignores them, as they all do him.

Soon, not nearly soon enough, the stables jut out from the horizon, and Jenkins feels the beginnings of something good in his heart — only for it to sink again. Muriel isn’t outside, grazing as she usually is. Even in the dark he should be able to see her, black on black on black with the moonlight shining on her coat, but she isn’t there.

He breaks into a sprint, mind filled with desperate thoughts of _not her too_ , and nearly knocks down the wooden doors to the stable, hoping against his better judgment that someone only brought the mare inside, so she wouldn’t somehow get in the way of the funeral.

"Oh, I was praying you'd be _smart_."

In the darkness inside the stable's stone walls, Lady Commander Harriet's red cloak is nearly black. She stands with her back to the door, one pale hand holding on Muriel's reigns as the black mare whinnies from inside her seldom used bay, unhappy from being locked up. 

Jenkins' entire body locks up. Harriet continues, unbothered. 

"You have been living under the assumption that your outings had gone unnoticed. I can assure you, they haven't."

She pats Muriel's muzzle once, then turns on her heels and lowers the cloak's hood. Her eyes are a deep brown, turned maroon by the latent magic buzzing in the air. Harriet looks him straight in the eyes, and even though Jenkins has a good head on her, it feels like she's looking down at him.

"Do you truly believe anything _happens_ in this Fortress that I am unaware of?" She asks in earnest, though she doesn't wait for an answer. "That anything escaped _him_?" 

Jenkins must look exactly like a fish, now — his mouth opening and closing uselessly, because _of course_ they knew. His perceived cleverness lays now thrown by his feet, butchered and dying, the delusion he's held on to for the better part of his teenage years, broken. Of course they knew. How could they not know, when Arthur had told him time and time again that the _one_ thing they were supposed to do for the Council was being the eyes and ears on the walls?

Harriet paces around him, slowly circling his frozen solid body with a look on her eyes halfway between pity and anger. 

"Arthur was far too lenient with you, Lee," she raises a hand lazily, supporting it by the elbow with the other, and rolls the purple ring around her finger with a thumb. "Allowing you these… Nightly excursions. You were his charge, however, so I had to sit and watch as he made excuse after excuse for your shameful behaviour. Not anymore."

She nods, repeats, "Not anymore," and the words strike him harder than anything else she could have done.

With her thumb pressed firmly on the underside of the purple ring, Harriet's eyes flash a brighter red, and a flash of energy shoots through Jenkins' chest, like fingers prodding at his soul. He has to fight the urge to kneel. 

"I am appointing Gabriel as your new retainer, and placing a ward on you. Please, do not attempt to run to the enemy — or do, if you are particularly curious as to the sort of punishment this will earn you."

Another wave of foreign, aggressive magic washes over him, and this time Jenkins does keel over, clutching at his head. As soon as it began, it's done, and he's left with nothing but a dull throbbing on the edge of his soul, and the taste of fire in his mouth.

The Lady Commander drops her hands, pulls her hood back up, by the way the fabric rustles, and walks right past him. 

"Go back to your room, Lee," she mutters, the odd tilt to her voice almost lost in the roaring wind coming in. If he didn't know any better, Jenkins would think she sounded sad. "You have plenty to do in the morrow."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first half of the "Pâro" chapter rewrite. Posted in July 28th.
> 
> Shout out to [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies), the best judge of Disney-villainess status.


	5. pâro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> n. The feling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, _colder, colder, colder_.
> 
> — [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Done being an instrument for you.

Nearly everything is a blur, from there on. Days drip away like candles, seemingly endless while he's watching with the barest of his awareness, sharp points of renewed pain when he's forced to pay attention.

First come the weeks of hard work in the dungeons — the whole thing should be taken down and rebuilt, in Jenkins' opinion, if only to have more time with them empty. Blue-speckled mages work day in and day out while he and Elena watch over like mother ducks, to the point where sunlight for him is a distant memory. He leaves to her the actual work of giving orders, for once not minding the occasional flash of yellow eyes towards him whenever someone in purples asks a question — Elena can answer for him, saves him the trouble of translating the jumbled mess of thoughts into something resembling a functional phrase. 

Weeks drip away into months, and the only things Jenkins knows about outside the Fortress' walls are the reports given either in Mikhail's monotone, or the far too self-satisfied energy on Yekaterina's voice. It's a toss up for which one is worse. He himself is supposed to give reports, but that too he leaves to Elena and nobody seems to mind.

Sometimes Harriet speaks. Sometimes she doesn't. Once she wasn't even there, presiding over them, leaving Siobhan to it. The way her voice shifted from the ever-present sarcasm and dry wit of his friend and soulmate to a shadow of the Lady Commander's emotionless droning in such a short span of time is astounding, and one of the moments that drive a hot knife down the center of Jenkins' soul. Doesn't help that her speech ends with the news that Harriet would be returning from wherever she went with prisoners for the newly finished dungeons.

Jenkins truly considers jumping off of his bed chamber's window that night. He would have, if he had any belief that he could tap into Siobhan's magic and make himself float down all the way beyond the walls. 

He doesn't. 

Come the morning, before the sun rises, he's faced with his true duty.

* * *

 

Elena was already down when Jenkins comes, waiting for him. The first handful of war prisoners — two skeleton monsters, and six elementals: three water, one earth, two fire — come chained in fetters of cyan light, led by three of Mikhail's men. They throw the earth elemental at the Head Mages' feet, pointing him as one of the generals in the recruit camp, and the others are shoved in separate cells, locked in with locks of pulsating, rainbow magic. 

Jenkins tries not to hear it when one of the water elementals curses his name in an all-too familiar voice, dies a little further inside when one of the cyan mages smashes the butt of a spear on Delta's shifting face to shut her up before tossing her into an empty cell. 

Gabriel, a burly man with a ragged cloak of purple and red, leads the earth elemental down the dark hallway to the only brightly lit chamber in the room. The monster is an amalgam of green-grey mossy rocks, like a golem, his face split unevenly down the middle by a wound that's still oozing yellowish particles of magic and dust. The cyan shackles disappear for a moment, only to reappear attaching the monster to the chair in the middle of the interrogation chamber.

Jenkins watches, almost in third person view, himself watching the monster struggle against the restraints, the fleeting second of freedom seemingly spurring him on to a burst of energy. The stone that makes up his featureless face splits open, perpendicular to the wound, and he screams — a mixture of the common language and something the mage vaguely recalls is called "Earthan". He doesn't understand much besides some curses, and can't make much of it before his retainer grabs him by the shoulder to bring him back to the moment at hand. 

His work, yes. He knows what he needs to do. Doesn't make it easier, though.

Jenkins leans over the chair, over the elemental still jerking against the magic keeping him still, places a hand upon the copper plate bend around his shoulder. He focuses on the feeling of it, rough and uneven on his fingertips, tries to let the feeling of duty wash over himself.

"Calm down," Jenkins whispers. His magic runs its course to his mouth, to coat the words with the force of a command — but it fizzles and dies on his throat, and the elemental keeps struggling.

Elena is by his side — if she was there before or if she just moved, Jenkins can't tell. Tendrils of orange magic weave through the cyan chains, and the monster screams again. She looks at him with her eyebrows furrowed, worry in the line of her mouth. Jenkins searches her face, despaired, sees the flash of yellow darting from his eyes down to the elemental, then back, and she says:

"It's hurting him," Elena swallows, and Jenkins can't tell if she's being honest. "It's going to keep hurting him as long as he tries to break free."

Later down the line, Jenkins would like to lie to himself and say he searched Elena's face for any sign of dishonesty, mulled over the way she avoided his gaze as soon as she was done speaking, that he'd done anything to have proof he should believe her — but he didn't. Believing blindly in her words was just enough to make him want to do this, to stop this perceived pain. 

When he leans over again, his voice deepens, magic fills his tongue with the taste of crushed violets. " _Calm down_ ," the command visibly runs its course over the elemental's body, until it drops heavily back on the chair. There's still orange light amidst the cyan, bathing the room in a sickly greenish glow. Jenkins runs his thumb over the curved plate. "We just want to ask you a few questions. Please — _don't lie and don't hide anything from us_."

 He steps back then, to give room for Elena. Two of the other mages stay, start barking questions — some of them are related to the assassination, some aren't. Jenkins tunes out of it, maintaining focus on his own magic, keeping the general pliable and willing. He feels dirty, sick, down to his very essence, and his command wavers again — he has to stop and re-do several times.

Eventually, they're done with the first. More come. More, and more, and more. Monsters first, then at some point humans — sympathizers, mostly unmagical, but there's mages then, and it all melds together in a blur of increasingly foul-tasting days. Jenkins keeps on feeling the sickness creeping in, the times he's gone out just after finishing a day's work to vomit everything he's ever eaten in his life also blurring together, until one day he stops — stops feeling sick, stops _feeling_ altogether.

It gets easier, they say. Easier to bring yourself to hurt others. Someone — maybe Kathryn? Maybe not — offers to see his stats after a particularly bad day, and Jenkins refuses. He doesn't want to see his own HP, doesn't want to see his own LV. He forbids whoever it was to offer again, goes to his bedchambers and shatters every mirror in his reach. 

It goes on, and on, and on. He's vaguely aware that years pass, because every year there's a ceremony for the fallen Head Mages. He doesn't go, but he hears the commotion. It's smaller every year. 

Jenkins once wonders what Arthur would think if he could see him, from wherever he is. The thought hurts — all thoughts of Arthur do —, so he buries them alongside the rest he's forgotten. Anything to keep on his duty.

Even the reports are all the same, now. Won this battle, lost the other. No news from the prisoners. The number of injured rises steadily, the number of monsters killed rises exponentially.

Until the day it doesn't. 

Until the day they're losing more than they're winning; there's less and less new prisoners, less and less new information. Elena and Jenkins have to interrogate the same ones over and over and over, no change in sight.

Until the day change comes.

* * *

It creeps up slowly, though Jenkins couldn't recall, if his life depended on it, when it began. Mikhail was speaking — his speeches in council meetings are far better than Yekaterina's, short and to the point, and his monotone is easier to ignore entirely than her excitement. 

"— in summary, we _must_ change something in our approach to this," those words pique Jenkins' attention from the depth of his blank thoughts, and the way his focus shifts nearly leaves him with whiplash.

Lady Commander Harriet hums. "Are you sure of it?"

"Yes. We stand in a stalemate right now —"

Yekaterina bursts out. "Bullshit! We're still stronger, even if not in numbers anymore."

Mikhail levels a glare in her direction, before turning to the Commander in her high seat. "Theoretically, yes. I did tell you, Katya—" 

"If I knew you'd stand there and spout that fucking crap I wouldn't have let you," she cuts him off, seemingly ready to get up and sock the other mage in the jaw.

Harriet ignores the outburst, the shadow of her hood concealing any expressions she might have in response to it. "Is that all, Fyodorov?" 

He bows his head. "Yes, my Lady."

The Commander flicks her wrist, dismissing him. Mikhail returns to his chair, and silence settles for a moment, although Yekaterina is still fuming from her seat, glaring daggers at the cyan mage from across the room. 

"I want to hear from all," Harriet declares suddenly. "How should we proceed?" 

Before the orange mage can speak up, Elena cuts in: "Lee and I haven't been able to find any information on the assassination," she isn't looking at the Commander — golden eyes locked on Jenkins' face, searching. He has enough sense of mind to send a thankful thought to the forefront of his conscience, hollow as it may be. "It's unlikely that we missed every single monster that could have known about it. We must urge all again to search for alternatives, and strike a truce in the meantime."

Yekaterina scoffs. "Does it matter now? They've spilled rivers of blood now, it's too late for peace."

"Shut your mouth, Katya," Elena turns sharply to the side, lips curled into a grimace. "It matters none to me your bloodlust, only serves to prove my point — this war is one of vengeance, not justice. I won't stand for it any longer."

The orange mage leans off the side of her seat, ready to spit words back at the other, when Harriet speaks: "So, you are for peace."

"Yes, my Lady."

"Very well," she falls silent once more. It's nearly impossible to sense where she's looking now, who she's expecting to hear from next, but the silence doesn't last — Yekaterina hits a closed fist on her armored chest, eyebrows knit together. 

"Regardless of what our _interrogator_ has said, monsters have committed atrocious acts over the past years," she looks around, pointedly at Elena longer, almost daring anyone to defy her words. "The King would have sent his soldiers, empowered by mage souls, to level our armies if we hadn't taken them out before they could fully assimilate them. Just the fact that they dared to do such a thing, tainting the sanctity of the soul, is enough for me to say we're still justified."

The Lady Commander hums in acknowledgement of her words, and Yekaterina crosses her arms with a huff. Jenkins thinks he should be at least a bit offended by the way she spat out the word interrogator — as if it wasn't by design that they were doing what they were doing, as if the soldiers didn't have a hand on the filled up dungeons — but he can't quite muster up the energy to care much.

Mikhail speaks next, eyes fixated on Yekaterina. 

"The only way we could feasibly win would be storming the castle," he speaks very matter-of-factly, as if discussing what to get for dinner. 

"Then we will," Yekaterina spits back. "I can round up the men in a day if the Lady Commander gives the order."

"What men?" Mikhail interjects. "We are down to a third of our numbers, and the Royal Guard has suffered little losses in the past three years. We can fight the Royal Army, yes — barrages of skeleton and elemental foot soldiers, but how do you propose we take down the elite? They are well stocked and well armed, and they threaten to outnumber us any time soon."

She doesn't have an answer for that. Mikhail waits for an input that doesn't come, before continuing:

"Our best hope is to strike a peace deal with the King. Offer to round up the last cells of purist dissidents, hope he'll take it, and work to rebuild our forces."

Across from him, Xavier clears his throat. "I—I agree," he's wringing his hands together, nervous. "We have… We lost a lot of healers. We can't keep going. I don't — I think they want to stop, too."

"I'm not so sure of that last part," Mikhail groans. "I wouldn't blame the royals if they wished to fully crush us after this whole ordeal."

"All the more reason for us to put an end to it!" Yekaterina shouts at both of them, teeth bared in a scowl.

Elena snarls back. "You ought to be out of your void-dammed mind—" 

" _ENOUGH_."

The three bickering parties freeze in place as Harriet's voice echoes throughout the room. All eyes on her now, as energy crackles from her body, unmistakably hers. She lets the silence settle alongside her burst of magic, stabs a pointy finger in the air on Siobhan's direction. 

Jenkins then feels something — a tendril of a _thing_ reaches over a space inside that's laid unused for years, at first raking over the overly raw expanse with sharp energy, as if he had walked out in the sun after too long a time in darkness. It takes longer than he'd like to admit for Jenkins to recognize it as Siobhan's magic, reaching out for his own. Their eyes meet just as their magic does, and she has a look in her eyes that he… He almost connects to something, some _time_ else. 

Her magic, navy and strong, fills his chest through their soulmate bond. Jenkins can't help but allow it in, the heaviness of her power, the familiar foreignness of it, the comfort lying just on the other side of the pain of remembering. Siobhan closes her eyes, sighs, and smiles — and he's suddenly back three, four years, barely a grown man, looking at his best friend through the bars of a gate, and she's smiling because they both know he's about to do something he shouldn't, and she wouldn't dream of telling him not to. 

Only this time it's her outside, looking in. He's powerless to deny her, deny them both of that connection left empty for far too long. Jenkins reaches out as well, feeling with the edge of his most essential self the phantasm echo of another bond, sees Xavier from the corner of his eye with his shoulders slumped — peaceful, for once, not the nervous, stammering mess of a Head Mage he's become —, and in this double vision he sees himself smile. He thought he'd forgotten how. 

Siobhan turns, empowered by both her soulmates, and the mantle of second-in-command visibly falls on her shoulders as she squares them, the hopeful smile wiped from her face so the level, stern expression she inherited from her predecessor returns. 

"My Lady, I have conducted my own research, independent from the interrogators," she doesn't waver, doesn't give more information — and Jenkins is sure as hell glad that all eyes were on him escaping the Commander's grasp. "And with Mikhail's reports to back us up, I can safely say that the response to the continued fighting will be a siege of the Fortress itself. We cannot afford that — we have neither the power nor the resources to survive a siege from the monsters. Peace is the only solution."

Jenkins can hear Yekaterina grinding her teeth together, and he slaps a hand to his mouth to stop himself from laughing — the sudden influx of emotion, after so long of not allowing himself to feel anything (that he blames entirely on Xavier's echoes of influence) is nearly too much to handle. 

"Peace is the only solution," he repeats after Siobhan, the taste of freedom nearly robbing all of his senses. His voice breaks and cracks, throat raw with lack of use, and Elena turns to look at him with a quirked eyebrow, but he doesn't care. "We learned nothing, we know even less! Even the first reports are being put in question because there's no way we didn't find a single soul who knows what happened."

The room falls silent once more after he speaks, and Jenkins is too overwhelmed with the crescent hope blossoming in his soul to care. 

He should have. 

The Lady Commander's hands appear from underneath her deep red robes, paler and thinner than Jenkins remembers ever seeing them, move up to lower her hood. Unmasked from the shadow of it, Harriet too looks worse for the wear — gaunt and tired, brown eyes sunken in above dark bags, mouth a thin, pale line. 

The room quickly fills with static energy, spreading like wildfire. It coalesces around Harriet, converging into a single point in the center of her forehead as she closes her eyes, taking the shape of a single vertical line, from hairline to the bridge of her nose. It opens, like a cartoonish eye, blinking twice before it takes full shape, the simulated red iris shifting and flaring with bursts of magic as if it were made of fire.

Jenkins can't help but shudder violently, his knuckles turning white with the strength he's holding on to the arms of his chair. Her magic is strong, more powerful than anything he's ever felt, ever would feel, moreso when she displays it in full strength as now — her true ability.

The entire room is silent to the point of sensorial deprivation, as if the magic had sucked everything into its gravitational pull, and it stays as such until Harriet lets out a quiet, pained whimper that echoes across the room, and the eye dissipates. Her head slumps forward, hands draped over her lap, and if he didn't know any better, Jenkins would have sworn he heard her cursing under her breath.

Elena definitely curses, her face bathed in yellow magic painfully bright like a sunrise, slaps an open hand on the arm of her chair.

Remnants of red energy float in the sunlight like motes of dust as the Lady Commander regains her breath, very clearly shaken by what she saw. They stay silent, waiting. 

Harriet raises her head, dull brown hair cascading out from the folds of her hood with the motion, clears her throat. "A moment," she covers her face in shadow once again. 

Elena begins getting up from her seat. "Commander, you cannot possibly—" 

The Commander is faster, rising to her feet in a flash of red, hand raised to the yellow mage. "I asked for a _moment_ , Cordeiro. Sit back _down_ ," she commands, and Elena drops heavily on the chair, eyes wide.

No one dares move. You could hear a pin dropping down in the central hallways, the stale air growing stiller, washed in what's left of the raw red magic shed from Harriet. When she speaks, it's barely above a whisper, but it's as jarring as if she'd shouted. 

"It's the only solution," she declares. Even though she's echoing Siobhan and his own words, the tone of finality in the statement sends chills down Jenkins' spine. His grasp on the connection to Siobhan deepens, widens — as if they were holding hands —, and he feels the phantom of the same happening on the other side, her reaching out for Xavier across the room so strongly that he can almost reach him as well.

Harriet gets up, folds both hands over her chest, the sleeves of her robes falling enough to reveal thin wrists, the pale skin pulled taut over bone.

"I saw — there's no peace to be had," the Commander stops, clears her throat. "Any envoy we sent will be killed on sight. I can't see whose order it would have been, I could only see —" She stops, her voice breaking at the end. When she continues, she sounds every bit as old as she is. "There's no point in continuing on with the war, either. We shall be wiped out either way."

Elena looks frantic, shifting in her seat. 

"— my Lady, that doesn't mean…" 

"Be quiet," Harriet murmurs. "You saw what I did. We have to."

Siobhan looks between the two of them. "What is this about?" 

"If neither peace nor war," Mikhail pipes up from across the room, his gaze fixed on Elena. "What's left for us to do?" 

Elena's eyes never leave the Commander's shadowed face, even as she licks her lips and mutters: "Imprisonment." 

The word is a cold arrow, shot straight through Jenkins' soul. He gasps aloud, robbed of every last bit of hope this past hour fed him, leaving only an impending sense of dread. 

The Commander paces down the steps to her high seat. "There are ancient scrolls down in the private sessions of the library. A ritual, for the seven of us to perform, that was designed by the First Commander to banish all of monsterkind from this plane into a — ah, what's it called? A demiplane. Between here and the great void beyond. They would be able to thrive there, I suppose, although in the end it's merely a barless prison."

Jenkins' knuckles are numb, from the way he's gripping the arms of his chair. She continues, walking deliberately to the center of the room.

"Later, ah, when the time comes, our successors can choose to liberate them. Captivity should be enough to breed the spirit of peace in them, in us. All in due time."

How can she say that with… Such little emotion to her voice? The only thing there is a lilt of a bastardized hope in the end.

"It is the only solution," she repeats, the words twisted into oblivion, into sick versions of themselves.

Jenkins looks around, searching — for any sign of dissidence, any _motion_ that could be perceived as against this. 

He finds none. 

"The sooner we do this, the better," Harriet drones on, undisputed. "We shall set the prisoners free, and march on the castle. By the foot of Mount Ebott, where the veil between the planes is thinner, this is the place designed for us to do this."

How can he sit and allow this to happen, be a part of their demise?

A deep sorrow settles over the entire council when Mikhail asks: "What will you have us do?" 

With a flick of the wrist, the Commander begins pointing towards each name she calls. "Fyodorov, Petrykha, I need both of you to gather all our remaining forces. There won't be a battle, but we need to be safe regardless," she walks a tight circle, humming. "Hayward, you come with me to find the materials necessary. Velazco can come as well, he has a good eye."

Jenkins shifts in his seat, unable to sit still. Why is everyone so — so complacent? Harriet walks and talks like a woman possessed, ranting off whatever she remembers of the scrolls, the best time for the ritual to take place. She turns to Elena, turning her back to him but keeping a finger jabbed in his general direction.

"Cordeiro, Jenkins, I will need both of you to round up the prisoners, see if they need —" 

"No."

All eyes are on him.

Lady Commander Harriet pauses mid-sentence, turns her entire body around to face him. Jenkins feels very much like he's visibly sweating.

"Excuse me, Lee?" Harriet sounds more shocked than angry, per say. He would be surprised by the range of emotions she's displaying, if not for how he's too busy trembling like a leaf. 

"I—I can't stand for this," Jenkins swallows his nervousness, rises from his seat. "No one should live a prisoner, and I can't believe your words that peace is unattainable. The King is your nephew, would he really kill you in cold blood if you went there bearing a treaty?" 

The silence that follows is charged, magic coalescing from everywhere at once, lapping at his skin in ribbons of red light, grasping at his soul in a navy cloud. Jenkins holds on to that thread of pure Integrity, wincing at how much it hurts — feels like his own magic had been dormant for these past years, his Perseverance now renewed with the realization he cannot back down from this last hope, threaded together with Siobhan's unwavering trait. 

A flash of scarlet shines from beneath Harriet's hood, bright and dangerous. Determination produces the strongest kind of magic there is — and none as powerful as the Commander herself.

"You will do as you are told, Lee," she says, and Jenkins recognizes the command in those words. 

In that split second where his knees almost give out underneath him, he remembers — and finally understands — one of Arthur's lessons.

_You cannot use my own magic against myself, boy. I obey only myself._

Jenkins allows the wave of red magic wash over him, tasting in his mouth the thing Harriet is trying to emulate, and when he speaks his vision is swimming in a violet haze. 

"I won't."

He walks forwards purposefully, his magic spreading outwards from his soul to his limbs, coalescing into droplets of purple, slowly dripping to become mist before hitting the ground. There's a hint of blue in it, deepening the color, and he smiles — wild and unbound. 

"You dare raise your magic against me, child?" Harriet spits, energy crackling like electricity around her frame. "This is the last mistake you will ever make, that I promise you."

"I'm not attacking you," he tells her truthfully. "I just want to know — how can you be so sure you're not seeing the outcome you want to? How can you be so sure it's the only one?" 

The Commander breathes deeply. "You can't possibly begin to understand how it works. Sit down, and cease this foolishness at once. I have decided what to do, and you will obey."

"I will not, how many times do I have to say it? I'm done being an instrument for you," Jenkins takes one step back, frowning. How voice lowers to a whisper. "You made me—" He can't finish the thought, instead saying: "I'm not standing by as you make an entire species captive to clean up the mess _you_ made."

He turns around in a single motion, marching down towards the doors, hoping no one will see him shaking with anxiety. He barely made it halfway there when Harriet screams to his back: 

"And where are you going to go that you believe I won't find you, Lee?"

Her tone is sneering, threatening, and he stops dead in his tracks. She continues on, the rustle of fabric following her voice as it comes closer. 

"This is where you belong. You have always belonged here, where will you go? I know where your family dwells — though I am not sure you do, so that's a moot point…" Jenkins stiffens at that, the magic flowing through his arms fizzing out to almost nothing. Her voice digs its claws in his mind, vicious. 

"Or will you go and find one of your old lovers? The ones who haven't died in the first year must be just waiting to welcome you back into their beds. Regardless — I _will_ find you, and I will bring you back. You cannot turn your back to your duty."

Anger fills his chest, curls up around his soul and flares out in a renewed burst of magic. He is acutely aware of Siobhan's influence, the flow of righteousness wafting from her spot even if she doesn't move, knows he's right. He has to be. 

Jenkins' mouth fills with the taste of crushed violets. "Sit _down_ , Commander."

He doesn't look back, shoulders shaking with anticipation as she breathes an enraged gasp — maybe he's miscalculated, maybe he's got it wrong, but he's never wanted something as much as he wants her to leave him alone.

Fabric rustles as Harriet moves, the pitter-pat of her shoes on the marble of the steps, then the thud when she sits down heavily on the soft red cushions of her seat. 

Jenkins feels like he's flying. Another step towards the door, just a couple more, and he'll be free. 

"Traitor."

The single word stops him in his tracks again. The Commander continues, accusing. "If you step out of that door, you will be marked a traitor and treated as such. Can you really turn your back to your kin like this, and for what? Do you think monsterkind will take you with open arms?" 

She tsks, a loud, condescending noise. "They will kill you on sight. And then all of us will die as well — I saw it. Your friend saw it. You will doom all of us if you step out of that door, and for _what_? The chance of laying with a monster one last time before one of them strangles you and steals your soul for its power. You don't want to be a tool for the Council, but you truly think that you won't be a tool for the Kingdom? You are a bigger fool than I thought you were, Lee."

Her voice is grating, clawing at the righteousness he felt, pulling it away like a curtain to reveal his resolve naked and fragile underneath, the brittle quality of his not even half-baked plan. A traitor — the word hangs above his head, an axe ready to fall. Jenkins pushes against the flood of memory that he hadn't allowed himself to remember for so long, feels his eyes burn with the want to cry.

Another wave of magic washes over him, bathing his head in blue light. No. No, this option is awful, awful, and Jenkins will regret it, but the alternative is unacceptable.

Harriet is speaking again, but the words are lost on him. Her voice has turned into a shrill ramble in his ears, magic rolls off of his body, filling the air around him with mist, and the heavy, heady smell of violets. 

Quick correction, he's never wanted something quite as much as he wants this: "Be _quiet_ , Harriet," the command falls easily from his mouth.

The rambling stops with a gasp. 

He takes the final steps out of the room, purple mist covering his body like a shroud, single-minded in its purpose to make no one look at him leave. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit date: August 31st, 2019
> 
> Again, this is the longest chapter so far. I blame it on dialogue.
> 
> Shout out to [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies), who suffers with me thru tornadoes of emotions.


	6. aimonomia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> n. Fear that learning the name of something — a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger — will somehow ruin it, transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, which leaves one less mystery to flutter around your head, trying to get in.
> 
> — [The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows](https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One glorious, unabashed second.

The constant clicking of phalanges on the hard plastic keys of his computer's keyboard bounces off the walls in the empty, pristine lab. The documents on screen aren't those of the countless projects being developed by the team — nothing of the weapons, or the disabling mechanisms, or the new traps —, but a simple log, white on black. 

 **> ** **log #1**

 **> ** _I have been given the opportunity to rise in ranks, and fill in the vacant spot as one of the Royal Scientists._

 **>** _The King has instructed me to write down whatever progress is being made on the research on green magic, and the damage I have suffered specifically. I believe it's a fool's errand._

The scrolling wheel makes a noise when used, that is completely different from the usual noise it should make. He shakes the entire mouse a couple times, hearing it rattle in his hand until he deems it appropriate, puts it down and continues scrolling. 

 **> ** **log #18**

 **> ** _The fractures have not healed a bit since the last time I have written. Dr. Lagorio says there is some calcification, but those he has pointed out as healed were no more than hairline fractures that should have healed much sooner anyway._  

 **> ** _The Queen holds on to the ludicrous idea this has something to do with my mental state. She wants me to look into this hypothesis, that one's "fractured soul" could influence how their bodies react to healing._

 **> ** _Dr. Lagorio and I will begin testing with synthetic green magic, extracted from a human soul recovered last week by the Royal Army._

Not quite there yet, he continues scrolling through his logs, until he finds the one. 

**> log #32**

**> ** _Sgt. Grillby's injury has not shown any signs of improvement. The current running theory is that it is a side effect of the pure kind of magic wielded by the Head Mage of Bravery, and with a direct hit from her, it's a wonder he didn't dust then._

 **> ** _He has been appointed to the Royal Guard, to keep him out of the front lines. It will be easier to check his progress with him working so closely to the main lab._

Gaster hums quietly, clicking on the file annexed to that log and pulling a chart of several soul and body scans, dating from four months ago. Eyelights dart quickly from side to side as he analyses the data, pulling up the latest set of scans for comparison. 

After what could have been either ten minute or an hour, the skeleton reaches a satisfactory conclusion, and opens a new log. He hadn't even typed in the number (that's his 57th log in this particular research, so much for a "fool's errand") when the doors that led to the main corridor swung open violently, nearly knocking a series of test tubes so neatly arranged on the nearest counter clear on to the floor.

Gaster swivels around in his chair, panic rising in his ribcage, at the same time a very distraught King begins rambling.

"Oh, thank the _stars_ you're here — I thought you might be gone still, it's definitely far too _early_ for Alphonse," Asgore prattles on, a habit all-in-all unfit for both his station and the way he fills the entire doorway and then some with his frame, long curled horns an inch from scraping along the white ceilings. 

The skeleton doesn't comment on the habits of his scaly coworker-turned-friend, his mind zeroing in on the bundle cradled in Asgore's arms, a dark stain spreading across the purple fabric, over the King's white fur, exposed by his rolled up sleeves. Distinctively red, clearly human. 

Gaster frowns, but gets up from his chair regardless of his confusion and/or his feelings on the fact his boss' bundle is trailing droplets of blood on the formerly impeccably clean marble floor. The human's soul is a weak, unsteady blip on the periphery of his senses, trembling not quite as fiercely as Asgore's voice as he continues. 

"I know this is grossly unorthodox, but I need help. _He_ needs help, I — stars, Toriel hasn't come back from the western outpost, I don't know who else to come to," the King offers pitifully, eyes wide and maybe a little crazed in worry. 

" _I am not a healer, your Highness_ ," Gaster signs slowly, unsure. His research in healing begins and ends with monster physiology, the vast mysteries of bodies made of flesh and blood instead of magic and the tiniest bit of matter lost on him. 

The look Asgore gives him is full of fear, the King standing tall and regretful, feelings bared in a way that is definitely unfit for a ruler in the midst of war. His grave, booming voice breaks on the tail end of the word that he mutters, nearly begging: "Please."

It's a request greater than any order the King could issue. Gaster pats down his coat with scarred-through hands, gestures towards the end of the room where the scan machine lay, beside a frankly uncomfortable hospital bed. Half a dozen containers glimmer with distilled green magic, neatly labelled with Gaster's own codified script.

Asgore lays his bundle carefully on the bed, his entire mountain of a body cringing when the human whimpers as a result.

"Thank you," the King whispers as Gaster busied himself with the machine, fiddling with the power supply and running whatever little knowledge about the human body-slash-soul he could remember from late night conversations with Alphonse, who would clearly be better suited for this. "Thank you so much, I couldn't, I _can't_ trust anyone else with this — him."

Gaster doesn't understand, and the feeling is both familiar and upsetting, so he turns around to ask for an explanation only to find that he needs none. 

Large paws peeled the stained fabric away as the skeleton brought the scan machine to a whirring life, revealing the human amidst. A man, body encased in thick muscle from neck to ankle, a long sheet of blonde hair so dark it was almost brown falling off the edge of the bed, matted at the roots with blackened, dried blood. Half of the man's face was covered in similarly dry blood, and a gaping wound oozed fresh red, spanning from the side of his waist all the way across his stomach, seeping down to his loose grey pants. The rest of him lay covered in sweat, the pale skin red, body twitching even though he was clearly unconscious. 

But what really set Gaster off was the brooch, laid across the man's breast. Gold and purple, even spattered with dirt, the human-soul-shaped gemstone still caught the lights overhead.

" _A Head Mage_ ," the skeleton signs, mouthing the words as he went, in pure disbelief. He looks away from the mage, eyelights boring into Asgore's eyes, finding some satisfaction in his decency to look stricken. " _The Head Mage of Perseverance. What is he doing in my lab, Asgore?_ " 

If the sudden lack of decorum struck a nerve with the King, Gaster couldn't tell. He just shifted awkwardly on his massive feet, and rubbed one of his horns. 

"I—I found him. In the outer courtyard. The Guard, they were doing their jobs, and I must commend them on how they acted quickly, but —" He gestures with one big paw to the mage, writhing in the bed in pain and fever, brow furrowed. "You can feel it. Right? You can feel these things, I'm not — I'm not mad yet, right?" 

Gaster pauses, looks again to the (frankly, probably dying) man on the bed, with his eyelights first, then with his soul. The sense of his intent lingers, like a cloying scent stronger and less aggressive than the coppery blood he's covered in, the intent to give himself up without a fight. His confusion deepens, expands into unbidden questions: Why would a Head Mage come, unguarded, to give himself up to the King? Why him, this mage that as far as they were aware, had nothing to do with the war at large? 

Was this a trap? Was this mage sent to _die_ under the pretense of peace, so the defectors would rally under the black flag of his mourning? 

Mind running a thousand miles per second, Gaster summons a pair of spectral hands without thinking too much about it, setting on to hook the man to his machine, exhaling loudly when the unsteady thrum of his soul comes online through it.

Behind him, Asgore sighs, the sound deep in his cavernous chest.

"I will — I'll tell Tori about this as soon as I can. She has some experience with humans," he tells Gaster as if this would calm his now frantic pace. "Her schedule should be clear, she's just — in a meeting with the lead healers. I'll be back."

The skeleton nods, absorbed in thought. So much so that he barely realizes he's signing: " _Alphonse went to the southern outpost last night. He might still be there. I need him._ "

"I will send for him, yes," Asgore's voice is fainter, farther away. "Thank you again, my friend."

The door closes with a soft click behind the King, and Gaster makes a sound not so dissimilar to a woodchipper full of rocks. His bleeding soul will be the death of them all one day, this gigantic oaf of a monster who objectively despised this whole ordeal, and had too much kindness for a soul that was supposed to be bright red underneath the usual white. At least, if this were some sort of trap, the King's mercy had foiled it thoroughly. 

Will have, all depending on Gaster's work now. 

The skeleton curses under his breath, voice clipped and rough and very distinctively sounding like nails on a chalkboard, while he mentally runs a list of all the (very few) things he knows of the human body. 

First off, he is at least generally aware that blood is supposed to stay inside the body, so stopping the profuse bleeding from the wound should be high on the list. Gaster sends another pair of conjured hands off to the sink across the lab, himself moving to find any sort of thing he could feasibly use as bandages while his first pair of spectral hands continue to connect the mage to the scanner. 

The only thing Gaster finds in lieu of bandages is some spare lab coats stuffed in a cabinet, so he rips them into strips, gathering an armful of it by the time his third pair of hands returns with a large beaker full of water. After a moment of consideration, he rips yet another spare coat to use as a washcloth, pushing the sleeves of his own coat and his black sweater underneath up to his elbows. 

He sets on cleaning the open wound first, soaking a piece of fabric in water before running it along the mage's side. Immediately, the white remains of the lab coat turn pink, the smell of gore rising with a vengeance. The second pair of hands continue fiddling with the machine until it emits a soft beep, the tell-tale sign that it has successfully gathered its subject's stats. Gaster stops cleaning to look over his shoulder to the screen, and freezes. 

Clearly, the scanner hasn't been programmed to understand the general orientation human souls took, so the simulated soul there was right-side up. It shone a bright, fierce purple even in the admittedly primitive display, throwing off the graphs measuring his other traits because the Perseverance was so (fucking) off the charts. The skeleton stares, breaking all kinds of decorum and general good manners, eyelights fixed on the purple soul and imagining, for one glorious, unabashed second before his mind fully catches up, how it would feel to be bathed in that light in real life, in full technicolor resplendence. 

_What the fuck._

Gaster shakes his skull violently, cursing under his breath again. He's just impressed by the specimen — of course. It's not every day a Head Mage falls in his lap, nor that one gets to see them in their full glory. "Full glory" being the operative word here, because this one very much _isn't_ , and will not be anytime soon if Gaster doesn't get his shit together. Underneath the spot of purple, there's a smaller box with the man's current stats, and one number grabs his attention more than the rest. 

> **HP: 10/200**

Gaster's metaphorical breath catches in his non-existent throat, wondering — and marvelling on, really — how in the void this man is still alive, when the number ticks down to a 9 while he's watching. He goes back to mopping up the blood from the mage's wound, ignoring how he twitches and moans intermittently, then sending his now idle second pair of hands to grab more water once the one floating beside him has become essentially a glass of blood. The pattern repeats twice more, until the surrounding flesh is clear enough for him to assess the damages. 

The man's stomach and side sports a deep, clean cut. Particles of white magic cling to the edges of the wound — probably why it's still bleeding, but Gaster can't be certain —, most likely the work of either Dogamy or Dogaressa's axes. 

Gaster reaches for a vial of green on the counter, debating on the best way to administer it (and offhandedly wondering how much time has passed now, and why the fuck isn't Alphonse here yet with his bigger knowledge of primarily matter-based life forms) until the moment he gives up and just dumps half of the thing directly in the wound.

It… Works? Somewhat. The remaining magic there dissipates with a worrying fizzing noise as soon as the green liquid touches skin, and the bleeding apparently stops. Gaster glances over to the monitor, sighing through his nasal cavity at the man's HP slowly ticking up, levelling at 20. He grabs a handful of the makeshift bandages, debating on the best way to wrap them around the mage's middle. The man looks heavy — he is built like a marble statue, and probably weighs about as much as one —, and the skeleton decides not to chance breaking an ulna trying to support him, instead sending a fizzle of magic to manipulate the gravity on his torso.

That might have been a mistake.

Gaster nearly doubles over (and does drop the beaker full of pinkish water from his suddenly dismissed spectral hands) when his magic makes contact with the mage's soul. It's — he doesn't have a word for it. "Strong" seems weak in comparison to the scorching sensation of the miniature sun flaring inside the mage's chest, the unsteady, pitiful thrum of it still bigger and more than anything the skeleton had ever felt or seen. It's odd, even, that he would feel stronger like this than the very healthy soul captured for the healing magic experiments, but Gaster chalks it up to this particular man being one of the strongest mages alive. 

He tries (and fails) to ignore the pulsing sensation at the very base of his skull that comes with the effort and having his magic so close to a burning star of power, and does short work of wrapping the uneven bandages around the mage, letting him go as gently as the skeleton possibly can (which is to say, just a tad short of dropping the man on the back as soon as he's done), and he stops to admire his handiwork. 

It looks like absolute shit. 

Honestly, it still looks better than Gaster expected, all things considered. He would (literally) pat himself on the back if Alphonse hadn't threatened to upend a bucket full of cold water on his skull if he happened upon the skeleton doing it again, so he doesn't. Not out of fear, mind you, but because he has just ruined both of the spare lab coats and would very much prefer to finish a day's work in marginally dry clothes. 

As if on cue (and making good on his threat-slash-promise that he would appear every time Gaster felt exceedingly self-congratulatory), Alphonse rushes in through the back door that leads out to the side courtyard, looking positively disheveled. Panting, the lizard comes to a screeching halt a couple feet away from the hospital bed holding their new visitor, stopping to put both clawed hands to his knees and suck greedily on air. 

Gaster thinks about making a joke about lungs and their downfalls, but he doesn't (the threat of buckets of water not withstanding, it would be just plainly rude), instead moving to the sink to wash out the dried blood clinging to his bones while his colleague composed himself. 

He's about halfway done (as it turns out, it's a proper bitch to scrub blood off bone, who would've thought) by the time Alphonse has regained enough lung capacity to choke out a few words. 

"Stars, tha-tha-that's a lot of blood on the fl-floor."

Gaster exhales loudly, nearly a laugh, and conjures his second set of hands again, to sign behind his back. " _Blame it on the King. I am not cleaning._ "

Alphonse slaps a clawed hand on his shoulder, and the skeleton mock-flinches. "I-I-I am _not_ going to te-tell the interns to mop up hu-human gore."

A noncommittal grumble is all the lizard gets, so he moves towards the bed, likely to check on the current status of the (not so rapidly dying) mage. 

"Ho-ho-ho-holy _shit_ ," Alphonse stammers more violently than usual, his voice rising several octaves. "A _Head Mage_."

Gaster frowns, turns on his heels while grabbing a handful of paper towels to dry his hands. The spectral copies move within the lizard's field of vision, snapping phalanges a couple times to get his attention. 

" _Did Asgore not tell you?_ " 

" _No_!" Alphonse half-shouts, running full-speed across the lab to rummage through his drawers. "He-he sent a messenger, said it was ur-ur-urgent, and that yo-you per-personally asked for me!"

Gaster watches as he pulls out a large needle from a drawer, painstakingly cleaning it with a cloth damp and shining with white magic, waiting for some signal that he'd be of help (or that he wouldn't, and he should get out of the way). Waiting rewarded him with a vicious, tall lizard that is nearly all neck pushing past him with that knife of a needle in his claws and a hushed mutter that he should make himself useful and clean up the mage's face and scalp so that he can assess the damage there. 

So he does, sending his idle hands to pick up the fourth beaker of cold water while he looked for a piece of coat-turned-washcloth that hadn't been stained into oblivion with blood yet. 

It feels vaguely intimate, this part. Gaster has to cradle the man's head in one hand, because he keeps tossing it side to side in his unconsciousness, and pass the piece of rough fabric more delicately over his cheek and eye or, as he quickly figured out, brusque movements made the mage whimper in pain. It feels a little more than vague when the man's wheat-yellow eyelashes flutter against his high, flushed cheeks, and dull brown-green eyes look directly at him. 

"Ah…" The mage moans, low and gruff, tilting his head up and immediately wincing. "... 'm I dead?" 

Gaster, both hands occupied and no real time to conjure new ones to sign, falters without knowing how to answer for a moment, his panic interrupted by the man's lips quirking into the barest of smiles. 

"I… I gotta be…" He chuckles, a deep, very pleasant sound if not by the way his body seizes in a fit of coughing as soon as it's out of his mouth, spattering blood on Gaster's chest. That doesn't seem to throw him off whatever feverish haze he's in, because he continues: "... 'cause you… look positively angelic…" 

He makes a move to raise his hand, as if to touch Gaster's face (and at the same time he flinches away, some small, rioting part of his mind asks _why not lean in?_ ), but (un)fortunately the mage tried to raise the hand on the same side as his wound, and the resulting pull on it made him drop it back on the bed with a whimper. 

"... Not dead…" The mage mumbles to himself, rolling his head to the side. "No one… told me the void was s'pposed to… oh. That's a… big… needle…"

Gaster watches with mild amusement (and a little worry) the mage's eyes roll back in their sockets as he falls unconscious again. When he raises his eyelights, he sees the aforementioned needle, carefully cradled in Alphonse's claws, its contents glowing a bright, healthy green.

"Mo-mo-move," the lizard demands, gesturing with his free hand. "Give me s-s-space, go-go tell the King I-I am going to take ca-care of our guest now."

The skeleton gently deposits the mage's head back on the bed, steps back. " _Are you sure you don't need me here?"_  

He should have known by the razor sharp smile that preceded the answer, that he didn't want to hear it. He should have, but for all his intelligence, Gaster remained awful at reading his colleague until the last possible moment. 

"No-no, besides — wha-what are you go-go-going to do, ogle this po-poor man some more?" Gaster sputters, somewhere between deeply offended (he doesn't  _ogle_ ) and somehow ashamed, which only gives Alphonse room to push past him and shoo the skeleton away more firmly. "Go on now."

Still speechless by the sheer audacity of the accusation, Gaster gathers himself and walks out of the way — he watches, in a fit of sudden panic because it looks very violent, a phantom of pain coursing down the middle of his sternum, Alphonse punch the needle down the center of the mage's chest, the sudden intake of breath as the limp body jump-starts into brief consciousness to seize and curl protectively around the new injury, only to fall back with a heavy thud once the lizard monster pushes the vial of liquified green magic in.

Alphonse looks up as he pulls the needle out, covering the puncture with a scrap of cloth. 

"I-I got this, yo-yo-you go tell the King," then, as an afterthought: "Ask him to se-send someone to come cle-clean the floors."

Gaster, feeling inexplicably queasy, does just that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit date: September 4th, 2019.
> 
> [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies): "I'm just impressed by such an amazing specimen"  
> [Vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkened%20Skies): oh sure gaster, that's clearly why you're ogling


End file.
